Your First Board Meeting

When you first incorporated as a C-corporation, probably only you and your co-founder were named as board members. You never really had official meetings or voted on anything, that you were aware of. Your attorney would have you sign some documents from time to time but you didn’t pay much attention to them. After some time and some success, you raised an equity round of funding from a VC and one thing they required was a board seat and quarterly board meetings. Now it’s time for the first board meeting and you’re having a mild panic attack because you don’t know what to expect or how to prepare. And you certainly don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of your new VC investor.

This article is just for you. I’ll describe typical participants, presentation topics, formalities, common courtesies and other administrative activities associated with board meetings. Let’s get started.

Participants

Board Members

This one is obvious but realize that with your first equity funding round, it’s possible your lead investor will require the board to be made up of 1 member representing the Common shareholders (probably the company CEO), 1 representing the Preferred shareholders (probably the Partner at the VC that sponsored the recent funding activity) and 1 mutually-agreeable Independent member.

If you started out with 2-3 company founders as board members, the dynamics are about to change. And for anything that requires a majority vote of the board members (check your Bylaws or ask your attorney), you won’t be able to “slam dunk” the vote but rather will need the support of either your lead investor or the independent rep on the board. Hopefully you’re recognizing the importance of selecting the right independent rep.

Side bar comment – Even before you raise an equity round and start getting formal about board meetings, you should seriously try to avoid having a 2-member board with only you and a co-founder. Co-founders get into conflict with each other more often than many startups realize, and sometimes over critically fundamental company issues (see related article titled “Avoiding Co-Founder Conflict“). If one of these issues requires a majority vote of the board members, you’ll be left with a 1-1 tie and be stuck in a stalemate. The company can suffer dramatically as a result. Consider a close company advisor for the third seat. (see related article titled “Selecting an Advisor“)

Board Observers

It’s possible that you and your lead investor agreed to allow one or more of your other investors to have what’s called a “board observer” seat. These don’t come with voting rights but are allowed to participate in board meetings to get more inside scoop than whatever the company chooses to include in the monthly or quarterly updates it sends to all investors that have “Information Rights”.

The inclusion of board observers for early stage companies can get a little touchy because, from my experience, it’s very unusual for them to simply be an “observer”. That doesn’t mean their comments, questions and advice voiced during board meetings isn’t valuable. But it can change the tone and direction of a meeting. It also can create the feeling of lopsided support or opposition on an issue versus the way an actual board member vote might conclude. One option is to ask board observers to dial-in to the meeting rather than participate in person. This helps emphasize the role and expected activity of the in-person participants versus the more passive expectation of the board observer.

Employees

It is common to have select co-founders or company executives participate in some or all of the board meeting. Maybe not for the very first board meeting but for subsequent meetings, it’s often beneficial to have the responsible executive present certain sections in the Functional Updates section of the presentation (more on presentation content further below).

Company’s Attorney

It is common to have your attorney present. They will take notes to be used as the official Minutes of the meeting and they will be helpful for questions asked during the Board Business section of the meeting (more to come on this shortly). If you’re lucky, your attorney won’t charge for their participation in quarterly board meetings. It’s a service some startup attorneys offer at no charge. If you do get charged, you might want to ask if a paralegal that is familiar with your company’s legal matters can participate instead because their billable rate is considerably lower than your attorney (see related article titled “10 Tips for Controlling Legal Costs“). If this isn’t practical, ask your attorney if they would charge less if they simply dial-in versus participate in person. With this, they can do other work when you’re presenting information not of interest to them and highly unlikely to generate a question for them.

Company Advisors

I only recommend having advisors at board meetings if there is a specific reason. The less active they are in actual company operations, the less valuable they are for the board meetings. If they are serving as a part time marketing or business development executive (for example), then they might add a lot of value to the meeting.

Meeting Frequency & Length

Board meetings are usually quarterly, unless there’s something like an acquisition taking place that calls for more frequent meetings. After finishing a quarter, the company needs time to close the financial books and prepare the material. This means board meetings usually happen ~3 weeks after each quarter close. As for meeting length, it varies based on situation. I find that most board meetings for early stage companies last 90-120 minutes. As the company grows and the size of the board expands from three to five, the length of the board meeting also seems to grow (3-4 hours).

Presentation Agenda

Most companies choose to walk through a structured presentation. But that doesn’t mean the board meeting should be a one-way dump of information from company to board members. The more interaction you have in the meeting the better. Brad Feld has an interesting idea that involves no formal presentation but rather only dialog. You can read more about that here. I’ve never experienced anything like this and don’t know how practical it is but understand and agree with the spirit of the idea.

Official Board Business

There will always be some official business to be handled by the board. This is usually done either as the very first or the very last topic on the agenda. The reason is because only board members and the company attorney should be present (maybe board observers too) and it is practical to ask other participants to either delay their joining the meeting or to depart just before the Official Board Business section. Examples of Official Board Business are as follows:

Discussing or approving the sale of the company (see my related articles on M&A here)

Discussing or approving an acquisition of another company

CEO Update

In this section, I like to use one slide each to cover each of the listed further below. Just be careful not to drift into a full conversation on a topic you have in a future section of the presentation and with all of the supporting information. This section should be mostly to set the stage and you might have to make that clear first.

Highlights

Challenges

Current org chart

Hiring plan – perhaps just key positions rather than every position being recruited

Results

Financial – P&L and balance sheet for past quarter (1 slide each). Show deviations from the official plan and add some comments, where needed.

Operational – whatever 3-5 key metrics you track and message to the board as significant operational metrics (ie – a SaaS company might present MRR, CAC, churn, # new customers and select conversion rates). Most operation metrics should be graphed as a trend over time.

Projections

Select from the key financial and operational results presented in the prior section and project them through the end of the year or the next 4 quarters (depending on your planning horizon).

For early stage companies, it is common to show the “cash fume” date (the date you expect to run out of cash). Sometimes two dates are presented: forecasted (including expected new business) and conservative (assuming no new customers

Functional Updates

This section is an opportunity to showcase your co-founders or other executive team members. Divide up this section into however many sub-sections make sense for your organizational structure (ie – sales and marketing, product, operations). But please don’t crawl through every sub-function or detail of your business.

Other

You might have a few other things to cover before ending the meeting or going into the Official Board Business section.

Help needed – 1 slide listing specific help requested of the other board members

Upcoming board meetings – a listing of the next board meeting(s) already scheduled so the participants can ensure their calendars are marked

Non-traditional topics – perhaps a short planning session or other topic requested in advance by you or a board member, for some particular reason (setting a new financial plan, M&A discussion, etc)

Formalities

Most early stage company board meetings are informal. That doesn’t suggest lack of preparation but rather refers to the conduct of the meeting itself. The one exception is the Official Board Business section. Some investors or board members prefer to be more formal for this section to help make it clear if a particular item was approved or rejected. Taking this to an extreme, you could follow some parliamentary procedure like Robert’s Rules of Order, which is the gold standard for making motions, allowing discussion and seeking votes. But very few early stage companies take it that far. Here’s an easy substitute to consider, using stock option grant approval as the example:

(CEO) “Listed here are the stock option grants we need approved for recent hires. All are within our normal guidelines for the stated positions” (the CEO might add commentary about certain option grants, if needed)

(CEO) “Is there any discussion needed on this?” (pause to see if anyone has questions or comments)

(CEO) “Is anyone opposed?” (pause)

(CEO) “OK, the stock option grants are approved”

These formalities are only needed for items that require board approval. In other words, not items just being reviewed or discussed (ie – showing the current cap table or mentioning the percentage of the stock option pool still available for grant).

Common Courtesies

Advance Material – Send the presentation deck to the board participants at least 48 hours prior to the meeting so they have a chance to review and digest. It will help the meeting be more efficient and if you’re lucky you’ll get some quick feedback prior to the board meeting and can use that to make some changes or better prepare.

Time Management – If you schedule the meeting for 90 minutes, try to finish on time and realize there will be a lot of dialog during the meeting. Your presentation material should only consume about 50% of the board meeting timeline (if it were presented without interruption). You MUST allow a lot of time for dialog, first because it’s necessary and second because it’s the most valuable part of the meeting for all participants (company and board members). I can’t tell you how many board meetings I’ve been in where 25% of the material gets presented in rushed fashion in the last 15 minutes because of too much material and/or poor time management.

Level of Detail – It is very common for early stage company execs (actually, most company execs) to present at a level that is too detailed for the board members. I’m not suggesting that you abstract everything to such a high level that it’s not meaningful, but at least give the final draft version of a board presentation deck a review and ask yourself if the content is at the right level for the discussion you want to have.

Food and Drink – Depending on the time of day for your meeting, have an assortment of snacks and drinks available for the participants.

One final thought. The purpose of having board members is Oversight, not Management. It’s true that for many early stage companies with first-time founders, the board members also serve as advisors. But as the company grows or if the company has an experienced management team, the role of the board should be Oversight. My friend Joel Trammell describes this well in his article titled “Creating the High-Performance Board”. The way you interact with your board members and the material you decide to put in front of them should help support this. You run the company, not the board. If your board members lose confidence in your ability to run the company, they can make an effort to replace you.

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[…] If you wait until you’re in big trouble to bring on experienced advisors or board members, it might be too late to save your company. (see related articles titled “Selecting an Advisor” and “Your First Board Meeting”) […]